After Upgrade from 6.7U3 Free to 8.0U3e I am now in Evaluation Mode with no key

[Anthony Smith]

After I downloaded the new 8.03e from the broadcom site and upgraded my 6.7U3 free to the new 8.0U3e free edition. Everything worked perfectly. 

All VM's worked fine.

But I got a popup saying the server was in Evaluation mode expiring in 60 days. When I tested the install before I upgraded by pulling my datastore drives and booting the iso installer. All was well and the license said never expires.

What happens at the end of the evaluation period? Is there a free key I can request to sort this out?

Please advise.

Very best regards
Tony

[a_p_]

>>> When I tested the install before I upgraded by pulling my datastore drives and booting the iso installer. All was well and the license said never expires.

I did not try upgrades with the free Hypervisor ISO image yet, so I can't tell you why that happened.
Anyway, I don't exactly understand what you did so far. Why did you revert to the original version after the first upgrade attempt? 

Unless you enter a valid a license key (e.g. the one that you got with the first upgrade attempt) prior to the eval's expiration, the system will become unlicensed.

André

[Anthony Smith]

What I did is as I said. 

I shutdown my esxi host. Removed the current datastore drives and boot media. 

Then I tried the installer to check all was well with my hardware etc. All went perfectly and I had a fully working but completely empty exsi 8.0U3e install with a license that said never expires.

Then I shutdown the server. 

Put my 6.7U3 Datastores and boot media back in and then booted the server from the 8.0U3e ISO.

The server booted from the 8.0U3e ISO and offered to upgrade my 6.7U3 installation. Which went perfectly and I ended up with a 8.0U3e esxi server with all of my VM's etc. However the license now says evaluation mode expiring in 60 days, now 59 days! Waht happens at the end of that period. This version was supposed to be free. 

How can I get a free key for this installation. My 6.7U3 was the free version with a license that never expires before the upgrade. 

[bb2bb2]

likely bcom didn't test this scenario.  because why would someone ever do this if the free version never existed before ;).  

[Anthony Smith]

@bb2bb2

Because the free version did exist it was 6.7! And anyone who has it will probably want to upgrade to 8.0U3e so the prudent course would be to test it first with your hardware then if all is well. Upgrade your 6.7U3 to 8.0U3e following the published guidance.